“Demand generation” is an abstract enough concept that it is frequently brushed off as a marketing buzzword, but you’re probably doing demand generation tactics on a daily basis.
Demand generation isn’t a single tactic or strategy, rather it’s a combination of various tactics and strategies that address every part of the marketing and sales funnel and the customer lifecycle.
From initial attraction to retention, upselling and everything in between — every touchpoint you have with customers falls into the scope of demand generation.
If you’re just starting to create a demand generation strategy, there are a lot of different tactics you can implement across the entirety of the customer lifecycle, but using at least one strategy per customer lifecycle stage is a good rule of thumb.
Here are five demand generation strategies that are essential for any company.
Awareness: Establish Your Brand
Prior to prospects knowing who your company is or understanding what you do, they interact with your brand.
A foundational demand generation strategy is developing a strong brand that resonates with your buyer personas. Your brand dictates how your prospects and customers interact with your company and guides your future marketing efforts.
Create messaging that resonates with your buyer personas’ pain points and shows how your product or service can address them. Then make sure all the other elements of your company’s communications — from your font and color scheme to your voice and tone to your in-person conversations — support that messaging.
Consideration: Have a Website Primed For Lead Generation
Your company’s website isn’t for you, it’s for your customers. Instead of filling your site with flashy content and jargon that looks impressive but doesn’t say anything, empower your site visitors with the information they need to determine what the best solution is.
Your website should be designed with the desired visitors in mind. It should be easily navigable and go beyond merely promoting your product. Rather, ensure it contains resources that can help educate site visitors, compare solutions and enable them to reach your sales team if desired.
Make sure you’re creating inbound content to organically attract people and develop your conversion strategy with the prospect’s needs in mind.
Your website should also have a frictionless funnel in place, so if a site visitor wants to convert, they can fill out a form or engage with a chatbot to connect with sales or download a demo immediately.
Decision: Make Your Sales Process Buyer Centric, Not Salesperson Centric
Train your sales team to execute the sales process with the customer’s needs in mind. Instead of just selling as much as possible to meet their quota, they should be only selling what will really benefit the buyer.
If you sell your product or service to someone who really won’t benefit from it, they’ll churn. It costs more to acquire new customers than retain and upsell existing ones. So, selling to a poor-fit buyer in order to meet a sales goal will hurt the company in the long run.
Retention and Advocacy: Have a Customer Success Team Supporting Your Client Base
Don’t forget about your prospects once they become customers.
If you only focus on acquiring new customers, you’re missing out on ways to achieve sustained growth through increasing your customers’ lifetime value (CLV). Plus, if your customer service is poor, customers are more likely to complain and leave negative reviews, which can also make it more difficult to attract new customers.
Have a customer success team in place ensuring your product or service is accomplishing what your customer purchased it for and actively identifying opportunities to enhance your relationship.
Ultimately, you don’t just want to close customers, you want to create a community around your brand. Closing 1,000 customers who aren’t thrilled with their purchase won’t help your company grow as much as 100 customers who rave about you and your product will.
Bonus Strategy: Social Media Presence
It costs no money to create a social media account and maintain a robust presence, and in today’s digital age, there’s no question you should be doing that.
Social media provides an easy way for you to meet with prospects where they’re at and engage with them.
Plus social media is a trustmark. In addition to researching companies through search engines, prospects look them up on social media. Not being able to find those companies on social will set off red flags, especially if the company in question is a software or tech company or brands themselves as being innovative.
The Takeaway
Demand generation encompasses every touchpoint customers have with your company. To best serve your customers, don’t focus your marketing efforts solely on attraction and conversion efforts. Instead, employ tactics that address every customer lifestyle stage.
